Ivana Myskova (Ed.), Jan Zikmund (Ed.) The Book of Prague

Annotation

An ex-con on compassionate release revisits his old haunts, only to feel dispossessed by how much the city has changed... The son of political dissidents in Soviet-era Prague is condemned to a life of menial jobs, like working at a local abattoir, unable to imagine his prospects ever improving... A young shop assistant in a tourist-friendly antique shop imagines what Prague would now look like if Czechoslovakia had stood up to the Nazis... The stories collected in this anthology show Prague to be a city of myriad layers and multiple histories. Famous for its untouched, Gothic and Baroque architecture and its trapped-in-aspic charm, it is also a place that has lived through numerous traumas over the last century and learned to conceal its scars, perhaps a little too well. Just as its landmarks should be preserved, so should these hidden histories, and sometimes the best place to preserve them is in stories.